The Indie Photobook Library’s seminal traveling exhibition, curated by Larissa Leclair and Darius Himes, opened at Brooklyn's Photoville, after stops in San Francisco and DC. “A Survey of Documentary Styles in early 21st century Photobooks” draws from the iPL collection and features 70 photobooks, along with a selection of photographs from the books. The exhibition looks at the “documentary tradition” through the lens of a 21st century, global photographic community in which the lines between journalism, art and the long-term documentary project have blurred, morphed and continue to feed off of each other.

The books selected for this exhibition present a range of subject matter, each coupled with a particular visual language drawn from a pool of diversity. There are books that speak a more traditional documentary language, while there are those that explicitly critique that very same tradition; there are diaristic books and titles that overlay a typological structure; other books rely primarily on found and vernacular imagery; and there are many books that borrow heavily from an art-photography storehouse. The goal of this exhibition is to survey the field before us and to foreground questions of authorship, voice, style and content.